In 2014 Michele Farmer (Disability IT Support Analyst – ISD) came up with the idea for developing some projects and put in a bid with help from Steve Rowett (Digital Education Developments Team Leader) and was allocated some money to run a project for disabled students.

The idea was to give students a chance to develop resources that they felt would be useful to disabled and non-disabled users whilst gaining new skills, work experience and a bit of pocket money.

We recruited four students who worked on a variety of outputs and ideas. Mark Shaw worked on a film that compared different referencing tools which is helpful to all students. Two others, Richard Kendall and Lewis Hopper, worked on a series of informational films that told users about the various support systems available to disabled users as well as a short film on Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) from a personal perspective. James Prime worked on resources for blind users.

We are extremely impressed with the students’ efforts. Check out the links below to view the films they produced.

These projects were delivered with support from Digital Education Developments who helped to access some additional funding through the UCL ChangeMaker Digital Literacy programme.

All UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences Masters students were invited to submit a two-minute video that summarised their research. The aim of the competition was to showcase the high quality research being conducted by Masters students and to provide an opportunity for students to develop the necessary skills to make their research accessible to the public.

Students were instructed to answer the following:

What is your research question?
What have you found in relation to your question?
Why is it important?

The entries were of a high standard and demonstrated the excellent work taking place across the faculty. Four students particularly impressed the panel of judges with their ability to communicate their message in a clear and engaging manner.

The winners of our first Masters Video Competition are:

1st place:

Tara Brah (MSc Biology of Vision, supervised by Prof Shin-ichi Ohnuma). How do we make the third eye?

If we think the mentality of UK students is changing with the introduction of higher fees then let us further consider the implications of them being consumers of education. It could be argued with the traditional didactic lecture and reading list format that students have little choice but to consume (as in absorb) to achieve learning, but there’s little universal pedagogical support for this.

Students do produce one thing; the essay, many of them. But putting this summative and irksome artefact to one side, why don’t students produce all the way through their education? There is a stack of evidence that suggests engaging students to construct and co-create is how they learn successfully. There’s little wrong with a bit of homework but by pushing that further, why not engage students in producing educational content or better still, work with academic staff to design their entire undergraduate programmes. This is what University of Lincoln is trying, with a grant from the Higher Education Academy, and it looks very interesting:

Student as Producer emphasises the role of the student as collaborators in the production of knowledge. The capacity for Student as Producer is grounded in the human attributes of creativity and desire, so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design. Undergraduate students will work alongside staff in the design and delivery of their teaching and learning programmes, and in the production of work of academic content and value.